A new addition

I thought of posting this on our carers blog, since that's what it's about, but I get more visitors here so I thought I'd share it with more people.

Yesterday I got a phone call from another carer in our area asking if we could take another baby lorikeet. There aren't many people in our area that do lorikeets so we tend to get a lot of calls about them from vets, wildlife organisations and other carers. This particular carer told me she was picking it up from a vet, but they weren't absolutely sure it was a lorikeet. They just said it had grey downy feathers, which meant it could be pretty much anything.

Well this is what arrived a half hour later.



You can see why the vet wasn't completely certain of the species, in fact I'm not even sure yet whether it's a Rainbow lorikeet or a Scaley-breasted lorikeet. For those that are interested in such things, the little tyke weighed in at around 31g. That little hole behind the eye is one of its ears. How often do you get to see a birds ears?



This is a photo taken today just after a feed. That bulge in the chest is the crop, full of Wombaroo honeyeater mix, a special formulation we feed a lot of our birds. The crop literally swells up like a balloon when they're fed, then deflates as they digest their meal. Then it's ready to fill it up again in a couple of hours.

As you can see, the eyes are starting to open now. He (or she) can't really stand up properly on those legs, but it won't be long.

I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Shooting star

I saw a shooting star this morning.

Now this is amazing for two reasons; one, I'm not usually up at 4:45 in the morning, and two, I'd literally only just looked up at the sky when it went overhead, so the chances of my seeing it were pretty slim. I was just leaving for work at the time, so you can imagine what my wish was.

Tonight's lotto has jackpotted to $80 million, so you never know.

Mail

We've been delivering junk mail for a few months now and we've seen a huge variety in letterboxes, some are great, some are really original, and some are absolutely useless for anything bigger than a postcard. I've even had a few that have fallen over or broken as soon as I touched them, must be a hard life being a letterbox.

There's a question I've been mulling over since we started doing the deliveries and I still haven't come up with an answer.

Why do letterbox manufacturers find it necessary to put the word 'letters' or 'mail' on the front of their product?

It's not like the postie is going to get confused and not know where to put the mail. Quite often the word is so big there's nowhere to put the house number, or a 'No Junk Mail' sticker. I'll admit I have seen a couple of letterboxes that could have done with a label on them, one was a metal pedal bin. I don't think I ever put anything in that one. If it had the number on it I might have, but then so does the wheelie bin.

Time to move

They've found me again.

I got a letter today from the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes people to say I've got a good chance to win $500,000. I thought I'd got them off my scent years ago, I guess not.

If I ever go missing, don't call the cops, just call Reader's Digest. They'll find anyone eventually. I bet they know where Lord Lucan is.

A stranger in these parts

Regular readers may remember an old post of mine about a strange visitor we had about 18 months ago. If not, you can click here to read about the red-fronted parakeet.

Well we had another visitor today that doesn't look like it's from these parts.



As you know, Donna and I look after native wildlife. We have several Rainbow Lorikeets at the moment, including one I'm hand feeding because it's so young, and we get a lot of them visiting our backyard as well. The visitors were making a bit of noise this morning and when I looked outside I saw the bird in the above picture sitting on our verandah.

If you look at it quickly it looks very much like a Rainbow Lorikeet, just with less colour and more size. The lorikeets were chasing it away from the feeder hanging in our tree, but it was determined to hang around and have a feed, so I had heaps of time to take photos of it.

We have several bird books, so I got them all out and tried to indentify it. The only bird I could find that resembles this one is the Superb Parrot. The thing is though, they have a very restricted range in New South Wales and aren't found anywhere else.

If it is a Superb Parrot, then it's a pretty sure bet that it's an escaped pet, which wouldn't surprise me. We got a call to pick up a couple of birds from a local vet about two months ago. One was a lorikeet and the other a cockatiel. When I opened the cage to get the cockatiel out, he ran up my arm and sat on my shoulder. Apparently, he was delivered to the vet that way after being found in someone's backyard.

We generally don't like the idea of birds being kept in cages as pets, but this little guy is too tame to be released, so he's now got a permanent home with us and he's been named Bruce.

Duck!!!

We've got an Australian Wood Duck into care recently. A friend of ours dropped him off, she said he'd got a problem with one of his legs. We have a local vet that is really good with wildlife, and birds in particular.

So I gave them a call.

"Hello, this is Steve, I've got a woodie..."

"Click."

OK, I approached that the wrong way, I'll try again.

"Hello, this is Steve again. D'you wanna duck..."

"Click".

I was going to try again, but five minutes later there was a knock at the door.

"Don't Taze me Bro!"

The boys in blue were really apologetic when I explained everything to them. They said something about the orange sauce really bringing out the flavours. Personally, I think duck is too boney to compete with chicken or turkey and the idea of blowing up a ducks bum to make Peking duck doesn't really appeal.

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But seriously though, we did get a duck this evening and he's going to the vet tomorrow to have his leg looked at. Most of my writing lately has been academic stuff, so I thought I'd get bit creative. After all, I'm not being marked on my blog entries.

A few days in the life of a student, day 4

For those of you eagerly waiting to hear about the final day of my stay at Mt Hyland, sorry about the delay. I've had a couple of big uni assignments to finish and they got priority, as did work and the animals. Now lets see if I can remember what happened on the last day.

As I was eager to head home as early as possible when we finished, I starting packing my gear into the car as soon as I got up, something those in tents should have done. We didn't actually know what time we would finish, but if it was early I could probably be home before it got dark. If we finished late I'd be looking for somewhere to stay in Dorrigo or Grafton, or even back in Armidale, and driving home the next day.

After breakfast we went down to collect the nests that we'd put out on day one and, surprise surprise, the one I'd put out had a mark on the egg where something had tried to eat it.



Back up to the main buildings and we all sat around examining our nests and working out what nests had been attacked and by what. The one in the picture above had most likely been predated by some kind of mammal like a mouse, some of our other nests had been predated by birds.

We then gathered in the dining room where a spokesperson from each group got up and told us all what they'd found when searching for their endangered species. It was unanimous, no group found what they were looking for. Just goes to prove how endangered they are doesn't it.

While we were still in the dining room, the data gathered from the nest predation experiment was collated as we'd be using it for an assignment, one of those I've just recently finished. We were given a bit of an idea how the final exam would be structured, that's normal for the end of a residential school. This one will be sent to us and we'll have two weeks to complete it and send it back in.

Once all that was done we had morning tea before being turned loose to pack up before lunch. This was around 11am and I was already packed, so a cup of tea and a bit of cake and I was ready to go. I said my goodbyes to a few friends and if it hadn't been for the fact that the heavens opened as I was eating my cake, you wouldn't have seen me for dust. Actually, rain had been forecast for the whole time we were there, so we were very lucky it came when it did. I'm just glad I wasn't one of those people that hadn't packed their tent yet.

I was home by five, just as Donna was finishing feeding all the animals. There was a huge rain shower when I was about two minutes from home too, I wonder if someone was trying to tell me something. It was sad to be leaving Mt Hyland, because everyone had such a great time, but it was still good to be home.